Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2016
Evaristo de Pinho Oliveira is the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Water and Habitat Unit. He started working with the ICRC as a water and sanitation engineer in 1995. Over the next ten years he completed missions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Angola, Iraq, Sudan and East Timor, and provided water and habitat support to the ICRC's regional delegations in Asia. He then was based at ICRC headquarters in Geneva, where he held several positions supporting field operations in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In 2016, he co-authored the ICRC's report on Urban services in protracted armed conflict: A call for a better approach to assisting affected people. Prior to working at the ICRC, he worked in Quebec as an engineer and as a teaching assistant at McGill University.
1 ICRC, Urban Services in Protracted Armed Conflict: A Call for a Better Approach to Assisting Affected People, Report, 2015, available at: https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/publications/icrc-002-4249.pdf.
2 For further discussion, see the articles by Isabel Robinson and by Mark Zeitoun and Michael Talhami in this edition of the Review.
3 Editor's note: For an example of the general lack of respect among warring parties for the protected status of water installations as an essential service, see ICRC, Bled Dry: How War in the Middle East is Bringing the Region to the Brink of a Water Catastrophe, Report, 2015, available at: https://www.icrc.org/en/document/bled-dry-how-war-middle-east-bringing-region-brink-water-catastrophe.
4 See the Q&A on explosive weapons in populated areas that also appears in this edition for more on the IHL rules relevant to this topic.
5 See ICRC, above note 1.
6 ICRC, “Our Work in Syria: Facts and Figures 2015”, available at: https://www.icrc.org/en/download/file/18634/syria-war-icrc-action-2015.pdf.
7 ICRC, above note 1, pp. 25, 34 and 38.